Posts: 26 to 33 of 33

Re: Newer kernel for silvermoon

This is sort of reviving a dead thread (but what's not these days ), but I've been following the work you all have done and it's amazing! I've recently picked my chumby up again with hopes of reviving it in, to me, a more usable form. I so far have compiled the kernel and gotten Archlinux running pretty well, except there's no physical screen activity (only ttyS0) (kind of a problem for usability) and there's no wifi. I understand there was stuff with the wifi driver, but I'm not sure I quite understand how it works nor do I "see" it in linux. I'm not sure where to even look for a new adaptor past ifconfig -a. I'd look into the schematics, but I can't seem to find them online (404). Are those still somewhere?

Additionally, I don't know how to modify u-boot. The only things I can find online for it are OE. Okay, but I can't actually build any of that stuff because it's too old. I did manage to find a half-baked version I had made with a u-boot.bin. This is all great, but really all I want to do is change the bootcmd environment variable, no? Also, ext2load/fs fails to correctly read an ext3 partiton that was not part of the original image (just says it's empty), so I'm just using the second chumby partition to hold the kernel, and then I direct it to a new, third partition with Arch. I'm not very versed in bootloaders and the documentation for this case is pretty sparse.

I guess I'm just here asking if anyone knows where to go from here and to say that Chumbies aren't dead yet. Sure I may not be using the chumby.com service, but I'd really like to get the hardware working.

Re: Newer kernel for silvermoon

Yes, I've got a 3.13-rc3 kernel up and running. I'd like to find a way to boot straight into the kernel without having to interrupt u-boot. It looks like it tries to load krnA or krnB depending on whether it's a recovery boot or not, both are offset in the kernel image somewhere? Just subbing in vmlinuz doesn't boot. I have to interrupt the bootup and run

where zImage is the kernel image I compiled (works with vmlinuz as well, but it seems to have to be compressed, i.e. not vmlinux). I have deleted every file off the old second partition except the boot directory and then for by bootargs I have (among other things)

root=/dev/mmcblk0p3 init=/bin/init

. I don't particularly want to go poking around in the first partition with a hex editor if I don't have to, but I've got backups. Also, what's so special about the stock second partition that makes it readable by u-boot, but not a new ext3 partition?

Re: Newer kernel for silvermoon

Well I've gotten it to a state where I think any more work is more than it's worth. For documentation purposes, I did the following. I edited the bootloader with a hex editor and it seems to have worked, but now when I drop to a u-boot command line, most of the commands, when passed arguments, say that the command is undefined. Since it boots automatically with no problems, though, I'm done messing with it (It's the same length, too. I don't know what happened). As for the kernel, I wasn't able to forward port any more, despite trying. Shutdown/reboot don't work (I get an error from serial/pxa.c saying that it would send the command and get a response of 00 and after several tries it errors out and halts). Sound: it seems to load the kernel module, wm8961, but I can't seem to be able to get the driver to talk to de device, but this may be my own lack of how the ASoC system works. This is the closest thing on the internet I could find, but I can't seem to figure it out. I just bought a USB sound adaptor, and that works just fine. I tried changing wm8961 to wm8960 and wm8962 in the source code, but they don't seem to be drop in replacements (both of those seem to have much better support in the kernel). As for networking, I couldn't get the libertas_sdio card inside to work, so I just use a wifi dongle (be careful if you get one, the 3.13 kernel does not support the mt7601u chipset out of the box (though there are drivers online to compile yourself) and many more. Do research before buying). I also tried a bit to get the touchscreen working but soon realized what a rabbit hole that was and stopped before it had eaten a solid week of my time. Additionally, I tried, but failed at, getting the pwm backlight to work. Other than that it seems to be working. I did encounter swapped red/blue (which no one else on the internet seems to have?), but I solved it by changing the .panel_rbswap variable to 1 in the pxa168fb_mach_info chumby8_lcd_info struct. I don't know who's interested in any of this in this thread (you all seem so much more knowledgeable than I), but I hate it when there's a thread on the internet with no conclusion or closure.

Re: Newer kernel for silvermoon

Re: Newer kernel for silvermoon

Thanks for the follow-up!

mark005 wrote:

I hate it when there's a thread on the internet with no conclusion or closure.

Here! Here! Even if there are people here more knowledgeable than you, (Duane, that's you), you've actually done the work and even managed to come back and share what you've done. That helps those of us that may do something similar in the future.

Re: Newer kernel for silvermoon

I did encounter swapped red/blue (which no one else on the internet seems to have?), but I solved it by changing the .panel_rbswap variable to 1 in the pxa168fb_mach_info chumby8_lcd_info struct.

Here's a reference to that for you from just over 6 years ago http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=5218 . I had ran into that on some of the earlier projects that were built. I also had quite a bit of fun trying to get the original toolchain to build a properly booting kernel for the Insight8, but that was many years ago at this point shortly after its release.

It's great to hear that you've made as much progress as you have! It's still a really great hardware platform to work with and since I've come across mine I believe I am going to whip up a modular remote for the RaspPI. And no matter what, someone that is out there somewhere will come across your post and find it interesting or very useful. It may just take a while.